IT would be vain for our Lord to desire souls to
make
reparation if there were not some souls with intelligence sufficient to
understand the need of it, and with love sufficient to consecrate their
lives to it. Happily throughout the history of the Church, we may even
say throughout the history of the world, there have been souls with
both the understanding and the will. Already Job had been accustomed to
offer sacrifice to the Lord to make reparation for any guilt that there
may have been in the probably quite legitimate, but doubtless
sumptuous, repasts in which his sons used to indulge. But let us pass
on to consider the history of Christianity. It would be a mistake to
think that reparation was unknown till the time of Margaret Mary.

I. REPARATION BEFORE MARGARET MARY

If there is a life rich in teaching on the subject of reparation,
surely it is that of the famous Dominican tertiary, St. Catherine of
Siena. The great lesson of the Dialogues
is the solidarity of mankind for good as well as for ill; and this is
the basis of Reparation. Our Lord gave her the special mission to make
reparation herself and to find other souls to work with her for the
same object.

God knows, the world fared ill enough in those days. In addition to
other evils there were grave disputes as to who was the real Sovereign
Pontiff.

It was the time of the great Schism of the West: one Pope at Avignon,
another in Rome. Which of them was the true one? How were the minds of
men to have that peace and tranquillity which they needed if they were
to give God some little honour and glory to make compensation for the
brutal crimes, the injustice, the immorality-----even
in the sanctuary itself-----and the general
corruption of the day? [Catherine of Siena has some moving pages in the
Dialogues on the sins of
the clergy.]

One day as the Dominican Saint was lamenting these evils
at the feet of her Saviour, she heard the words: "My dear child, your
tears are all-powerful because they are shed for love of Me. I cannot
resist your prayer. Look at the disfigurement of the countenance of my
spouse. She is like a leper with impurity, selfishness, pride and
avarice."

And on another occasion: "Remember that before the plague I showed you
how horrified I was at the vice of impurity and how the whole world was
infected with it. . . . I showed you the whole world. Everywhere,
in every rank of life, you saw this terrible vice. Nowhere could you
find refuge for Me or for My servants, for this leprosy was everywhere.
The majority had body and soul stained with it. I showed you how amidst
all the guilty a few remained pure; for among the wicked I have always
some chosen ones whose virtue and good works restrain My justice and
prevent me from bidding the mountains fall and crush the guilty, the
earth to open and swallow them up, the wild beasts to devour them, the
demons to carry them off, body and soul. I want to have mercy on them
and make them change their lives. For this purpose I make use of My
servants, who are free from this leprosy, and I make them pray for the
guilty." (Dial. 124.)

St. Lutgarde, of Tongres in Belgium, Prioress of the Convent of St.
Catherine at Saint-Trond, and later a Cistercian at Aywières
(Brabant),
was one of the first mystics to receive favours from the Sacred Heart.
One night when she was ill, burning with fever and bathed in
perspiration, she thought of dispensing herself from presence at
Matins. Our Lord appeared to her and invited her to rise and go into
choir to intercede for sinners. The Saint immediately obeyed. As she
was going into the church Christ appeared to her, nailed to the Cross
and covered with blood; He detached an arm from the Cross and embracing
her, put the virgin's lips to the wound in His side. The Saint drew
therefrom so much strength that thenceforth she devoted herself with
the greatest ardour to the work of reparation. (Acta Sanctorum, t. iv,
June, p. 193, n. 12.)

Shortly before the time of St. Catherine of Siena we have St.
Bridget
(1302-1373), who was sent by God to four Popes to put an end to the
schism of the West. In a famous vision, when she was ten years old, our
Saviour crucified had revealed to her the depth and the extent of his
suffering. "Who has treated Thee so, O Lord?" asked the Saint. "Those
who despise and reject My love," answered the Saviour. And often the
Saint almost fainted during her prayers at the sight of the human
iniquity which was revealed to her. "Happily," she tells us, "love
tempered the cruelty of these insults." And whence came this love? From
the reparation that was offered to God.

VIEW ST. LYDWINE

In the same year that saw the death of Catherine of Siena two women
were born who were to play an important part in the history of
reparation: St. Colette and St. Lydwine; both were to undergo suffering
and death for the sake of the Church, still gravely troubled by schism.

"Widely different as their lives were," writes Huysmans in his masterly
preface to the life of St Lydwine, "they nevertheless present striking
points of similarity. Both were born of poor parents; both were pretty,
but by their own desire became ugly; both suffered constant pain; both
bore the stigmata of Calvary; both at death recovered the beauty of
their youth, and their bodies gave forth a sweet odour. Both of them
thirsted for suffering their whole life long; but only Colette remained
in good health in spite of all, for she had to journey from one end of
France to the other; while Lydwine, motionless upon her bed, journeyed
in the world beyond. Each of them, too, was the saviour of her
country."

Like these two, Frances of Rome undertook the mission of reparation for
the crimes of her contemporaries. "These three women," writes Huysmans,
"sometimes by opposite paths, sometimes by the same, measured their
strength against the infernal powers of their time. And what a terrible
task that was! Never had the world been so near to ruin. Never, one
might say, had God been busy in the task of preserving the balance
between virtue and vice, piling up the tortures of the Saints, as the
weight of iniquity increased."

The previous generation had seen Gertrude (1301) and Mechtilde
(1298),
two other pioneers of reparation. One day, when St. Mechtilde, the
sister of St. Gertrude, was bewailing her inability to follow the rule
by reason of her illness, she heard our Lord say to her: "Do Me the
favour of giving some relief to My Divine Heart." And she understood
Him to mean that whoever suffers willingly, in union with the love with
which Christ suffered, brings relief to that Divine Heart which so
ardently desires the salvation of humanity, and is so ill repaid.

The famous nun, St. Gertrude, used often to ask our Lord how she might
assuage the bitterness of His Passion. The answer she received throws
light on what we shall have to say later about effective reparation:
"If anyone considers the will of another instead of his own, He repays
me for the captivity, the bonds and the numerous insults that I
suffered for the sake of mankind. He who humbly confesses his guilt
recompenses Me for the accusations made against Me by false
witnesses, and for the sentence of death passed upon Me. He who submits
to ill-humoured superiors lightens the weight of My crown of thorns. He
who, being offended by someone, makes the first approach to
reconciliation, compensates Me for the carrying of My Cross. He who
suffers insult or tribulation in order to save his neighbour from sin,
makes up to Me for the death I suffered for humanity. If anyone suffers
insult with humility, he takes Me down from the Cross. And he who puts
his neighbour before himself, deeming him more worthy of honour and
reward, repays Me for My burial." (The
Herald of Divine Love, iv, 26.)

The conversion of Giacomo Benedetti-----better known as
Jacopone de Todi, the author of the Stabat
Mater-----was due to his discovery that his young
wife was devoted
to reparation. The facts are these. After he had finished his studies
in law Giacomo had married, and he was very proud of his wife. One day
in the year 1288, which happened to be a great festival at Todi, the
stand on which his wife was, collapsed. He rushed to her rescue, and
would have freed her from her garments. She refused, and when he
insisted, his fingers felt a hair shirt next to her skin. The lips of
the dying woman could not speak, but her look seemed to say: "This was
for you." God was awaiting this moment. He sold all his possessions,
became a beggar, and ten years later entered the Franciscan Order as a
lay-brother.

Many other names might be mentioned; we can only make a selection, and
choose the fairest flowers. Perhaps the sweetest of all is Rose of
Viterbo, of whom a historian writes: "She lived as a recluse, offering
herself constantly as a victim for the Church. Her whole life was, as
it were, an episode in the Communion of Saints; she realized her
membership of the great body of the Church of which St. Paul speaks,
and
this made her at the same time humble and proud. Humble, because she
would have liked to take upon her frail little shoulders-----she
was a
child of seven-----responsibility
for the sins that imperiled the Church;
proud, because her membership of the Church seemed to her to give a
special value to her life. She possessed a keen and precocious
appreciation of the solidarity which united her to other Christians, of
the way in which her poor little life was to be compenetrated by the
collective life of the Church." (G. Goyau: Autour du catholicisme
sociale, pp. 125-126.)

As centuries went on, sin increased and multiplied. We find it even in
the person of the successor of St. Peter. But God willed to choose out
instruments of expiation from the same exalted families that had given
so bad an example to the world. The life of Alexander VI was not an
edifying one; but in the very family of the Borgias, of which he was a
member, we find by God's providence heroes of expiation, such as Marie
Henriquez and Francis Borgia, formerly governor-general of the Indies,
who later succeeded St. Ignatius as superior-general of the Society of
Jesus.

These are a few whose names history has preserved for us. But besides
these stars of the first magnitude, how many other heroes of reparation
are there, no less gallant perhaps than they, though less well known.
God alone could give us a full list of them. The little that we have
said will suffice to show that well before the time of Margaret Mary
there were many souls who had offered themselves, or had been chosen by
God, for the great work of reparation. The word, perhaps, did not exist
in the vocabulary of spiritual writers or Saints; but the thing was
known; indeed, as history attests, it was the animating principle of
many lives.

II. FROM MARGARET MARY TO THE PRESENT DAY

For the history of Margaret Mary's desire to make reparation, it is
enough, as we have seen, to turn the pages of the two volumes of the
Paray edition. Even before the famous apparitions the Saint possessed
this desire. Before she entered religion already "her only wish was to
conform herself to the suffering life of our Lord, and throwing herself
at the foot of her crucifix she would say: 'O my dear Saviour, how
happy I should be if You would imprint upon me the image of Your
suffering.' Our Lord answered; 'That is what I intend to do, provided
you offer no resistance, and give your co-operation.' "

To prove her desire to make reparation she began to take the discipline
and she continued this penance all during Lent in honour of the
Scourging.

During the three days of Carnival she would have liked to tear her body
to pieces, to compensate our Lord for all the outrages that sinners
committed against the Divine Majesty. She fasted as much as she could.
(I, 53.)

After her profession she increased in understanding; she felt "a
distinct taste for what was most painful and mortifying; she regarded
herself as a victim destined to suffer for sinners." (I, 74.)
Sometimes, but rarely, the reparation necessary appeared to her in such
menacing proportions that for a moment she hesitated and sought to
escape, so heavy was the weight of justice upon sinners: " I am making
you feel only a small part of it; it is borne by holy souls lest it
should fall upon sinners." (I, 90.) The desolation she suffered seemed
like that of the damned: "She would hardly have been able to bear this
painful state for long, had our Lord's loving mercy not come to her
assistance under the rigours of His justice." (I, 180; II, 418.)
Usually, however, she finds her fullest happiness "when she is
conformed to her crucified Master"; she writes to Mère de
Saumaise: "I
should like to avenge upon myself all the injuries that are done to my
Lord Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament."

P. de la Colombiere, whom God set in the path of St. Margaret Mary to
confirm her in the devotion of reparation to the Sacred Heart,
understood with equal clearness the needs of Divine Justice and Love. 1"O
adorable Saviour," he wrote, "vouchsafe to grant my desire to
consecrate myself entirely to love and reparation to Your Divine Heart,
and to accept the gift that I make to You of all that I am and all that
I have. In reparation for all the outrages that have been committed
against You and for the terrible ingratitude that You suffer from men,
I consecrate to You myself and my life. . . . Give and take what
You will; use me or set me aside as a useless instrument; give me
consolations or give me trials; may Your will be done in all things.
May all this glorify Your Divine Heart and make reparation to It, and I
wish to make a full gift of all this to You, begging You to accept it
and to use it freely for the salvation of poor sinners."

Here is an offer of reparation, which re-echoes that of P. de la
Colombiere: "O my Jesus, You once gave Yourself up entirely for the
sake of men; and they have thanklessly repaid You with insults. Still
today Your Divine Heart burns with love for us in the Blessed
Sacrament, and there is no greater response to Your love. Filled with
sorrow at the insults and irreverence of which You are the object in
this Sacrament of love, I prostrate myself humbly before Your Divine
and loving Heart to make amends for such ingratitude. Would that with
my tears and my blood I could for ever wipe out all irreverence,
outrage and sacrilege! How happy I should be to give up my life in so
noble a cause!"
(P. de Galiffet.)

If I were asked to say what new element is introduced into the history
of reparation by Saint Margaret Mary I should say that the point to be
stressed is this. In the case of Saints before her time there was
indeed the desire and the invitation to make reparation, but
spasmodically; it is rarely the motif of their whole lives. With
Margaret Mary it is her whole life that is called to reparation;
reparation is the axis upon which her devotion turns, it is the soul of
her spirituality; hence the tragic character, the dramatic intensity of
the confidences she makes to us. With a Mechtilde or a Gertrude, for
example, despite occasional periods of darkness, "we are nearly always
under a sky radiant with joy and glory." 2

To them Our Lord manifests rather the right that he has to our love
than the contempt in which we hold that love; hence there is less of
pain and sorrow in the revelations that he makes to them. To Margaret
Mary the Sacred Heart appears, "just as glorious and radiant, but the
sky of the visionary of Paray is nearly always darkened by the idea of
the love that is not loved in return, that has suffered so much, if it
is not suffering still." Not that the interior joy of the Saint is not
complete; but it is ever accompanied by the thought of Gethsemani. To
use an imperfect analogy, as our Lord during His agony was at one and
the same moment perfectly happy and tormented with sorrow, because He
had before Him at the same time the Beatific Vision of God and the
horrible spectacle of sin, so Margaret Mary is at one and the same time
ravished with delight and tortured with pain. The two sentiments would
seem to exclude each other, and yet they are but one.

About the same period as Margaret Mary other souls begin to turn their
thoughts towards reparation and the oblation of themselves as victims,
drawn thereto by reasons which varied in individual cases but were in
the main founded upon the one pregnant principle of compensation. I
refer to d'Olier, Condren, Eudes and others.

Their desire for reparation arose not so much from a vision as from a
conception. For them the determining factor was less the sight of
Christ suffering on the Cross for men, and to a great extent suffering
in vain, than the understanding of the doctrine that every Christian
forms a part of the complete Christ and, if he wishes to live up to his
vocation, must become a victim together with his Master. What led
Condren to the desire and the life of victimhood was, in the words of
the title of his book, an exact "Idea of the priesthood and sacrifice
of Jesus Christ." It was the same with Olier and Bérulle.
St. John Eudes, who also consecrated his life by a vow to the work of
reparation, takes us farther back than the Eucharist and rightly points
to Baptism as the Sacrament whereby every Christian is called to a
priesthood. His is the phrase which is at first sight rather startling
but, in the light of our union with Christ in the work of Redemption,
is seen to be so true: "The grace of Baptism is a grace of martyrdom."

John Eudes founded his Institute in 1643; the great revelation of Paray
was made in 1675. Each of these Saints shows the same understanding of
the devotion to the Sacred Heart, but undoubtedly it is Margaret Mary
who more stresses the fact that the ineffable love of our Lord is an
outraged love, an unrequited love; and thus the idea of reparation is
more in the foreground of her thought. Not that it is absent in the
case of P. Eudes: in his book Le Cœuradmirable,
after speaking of the love of our Lord for us, he says: "And yet what
are we doing, and what is the majority of mankind doing? They treat
this adorable Redeemer with such ingratitude that one would think that
He had done them all the harm in the world, and that they had never
received any benefits from Him at all. And yet . . . " He then quotes
the revelation made by our Lord to St. Bridget: "If I could suffer the
torments of My Passion as many times as there are souls in Hell I would
suffer them willingly, so ardent is the love of My Heart." Then he
continues: "Why do the majority of men treat the adorable Saviour as if
He were their worst enemy? How can they be so cruel as to crucify Him
every day! Yes, crucify Him; for whoever commits a mortal sin
'crucifies again to himself the Son of God'; and their crime is worse
than that of the Jews, who did not know Him. Let us shrink from such
ingratitude." 3

We have already seen how the idea of compensation,
so rich in meaning, which is salient in the writings of Margaret Mary,
gave rise to the further and even more significant idea of completion.
With the fuller understanding of our identification with Christ and the
need of identifying themselves with the redemptive mission of the
Saviour -----according to the famous words of St. Paul to
"fill up . . . those things that are wanting of the sufferings of
Christ" [Col. 1:24)-----men brought a clearer insight
and a more whole-hearted generosity to the work of co-operation with
the Saviour in reparation. From this point of view the present age,
though so backward in other respects, may be said to be preeminent; the
nineteenth, and still more the twentieth century, may be called the age
of reparation.

We find individuals and communities in great numbers all inspired with
the same object, that of reparation. Some of these names have already
been mentioned by us. 4 It can be said
with certainty that there is not one Saint, not one community during
the past century which has not aimed solely, or at any rate chiefly, at
reparation.

Leaving aside published lives, which are within the reach of any
interested enquirer, we will give here only a few examples of heroes
whose lives have never been written, but for the authenticity of which
the writer can fully vouch.

A young man falls seriously ill at the very moment in which he is about
to start his career; but he finds comfort in the reflection that his
sufferings will avail to atone for sin. This is what he writes to a
sick friend: "I live here right out in the country with my father and
mother, whom I am fortunate enough still to possess; but I am
completely isolated from the world. Yet this solitude does not depress
me; far from it. I love the peace and the silence which, as Psichari
puts it, 'brings light.' I find it a great help to prayer and
meditation, and my soul rises to God without effort and revels in the
contemplation of God as in its element. But here below there is no joy
without some admixture of sorrow, and this solitude, which is so much
in keeping with my state of mind, on the other hand imposes a hard
privation: I am deprived of the Holy Eucharist. I am five kilometres
from a church, and the good priest, having a large district to care
for, cannot bring me Holy Communion as often as I should like. This is
a great sacrifice; but I accept it as the Will of God.

"Situated as I am, you will readily understand that I have little
opportunity for talking; I pass whole months without seeing a soul, and
even the rare visits that I do receive give me little pleasure since
they only bring those banal expressions of sympathy for which I have no
use at all. I sometimes tell my visitors that I am not unhappy at all,
that you can always find supreme happiness in whatever state you may
happen to be, if only you know where to look for it, and that is in
God. When I speak like this I meet gazes of astonishment, mingled with
a little anxiety, as if I were suffering from some weakness of the
brain. People nowadays do not seem to understand the meaning of the
spirit of self-sacrifice; it has been stifled by an unrestrained desire
for selfish enjoyment. Thank God there are quite a number of
exceptions; but the majority are as I say. And this is why we, who have
the joy of understanding the value and the need of reparation by
suffering, are truly privileged, and on that account owe a great debt
of gratitude to God.

"Our trials, my friend, are very similar, and this forms a further link
between us. But while I am undergoing mine under the best possible
conditions, surrounded by the affectionate care of a beloved mother,
you are completely isolated.

"Here are the details of my illness: Pott's disease, with paraplegia, 5
but without any abscess; paralysis is gradually taking hold of my
shoulders and arms; the only joints in my body that I can move are my
ankles, my wrists and my right elbow. See how good Providence has been
to me; my right arm being practically normal, I can write, read and eat
without assistance. My illness began on April 8, 1914, and I have been
bedridden since September 15, 1915. In 1919 I was told definitely that
there was no chance of a cure, and since then I have enjoyed perfect
peace and tranquillity, offering it all up for the sake of Reparation.
I suffer little pain now; my attacks, though frequent, are not very
violent. In a word, my cross is very bearable." (Feb. 17, 1921.)

Here is a similar case from another country; bedridden, suffering from
the same disease, a woman writes: "My happiness -----I had
almost said my
pride-----is
increasing at the thought of having been chosen to 'fill up
those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ' and to help
Him to win souls. I am ready for any suffering, to bring souls back to
the fold, and especially one soul that is very dear to me; I do not
mind what it costs me. I am only a poor creature, but I want to give,
and give myself, without stint. He on His part constantly asks me for
more, and every day grants me new light. I am confounded at so many
graces. And so I am ready to give Him all that He wishes, no matter
what it may be, so long as the work progresses and my sacrifice is
fruitful.

"For months I have been thinking of death, during these last days
especially; and the thought, far from afflicting me, gives me great
consolation. What a happiness it will be to see God face to face and
thus enjoy Him for all eternity! Bitterly I regret the time I have
lost; I wish I could regain it by means of suffering arid love, so that
during the short time which remains to me I may console and make up to
our Saviour for that time past, which causes me such sorrow. It seems
as though He wishes to help me realize this desire, by sending me more
and more suffering. Lately I have suffered much physical pain, the
tumours are growing and have had to be pierced several times, and this
is very painful. I feel that it makes me weaker; but 'I abound with
joy.' God gives me transports and desires for penance; but obedience
will not allow me to put them into effect."

A little later she wrote: "I have to make use of my secretary again
because my poor arm and hand are powerless. Two new abscesses have
appeared, one under the right arm and another on the right shoulder.
Infection has set in, causing further complications; I have fever, and
such pain that I cannot rest in any position. This is the participation
in Christ's sufferings that I have so much desired. Although my pain is
so intense I am perfectly happy and I have not for a moment lost union
with our Lord. Happily He is too near me for that; otherwise I could
not bear the painful treatment of my wounds nor the torture that I
suffer every day. I have had the great happiness of receiving the last
Sacraments, and I cannot tell you what I felt when I received them. I
passed an hour in great intimacy with our Lord; I was filled with
graces and overcome with joy. A new horizon has opened out before me; I
want Him to use me ever more and more in this great work of Redemption.
At one moment I thought I was going to see our Lord face to face, and
this idea filled me with joy, making me quite indifferent with regard
to the future, so that I desired and asked nothing more. May His Will
be done!"

Another young girl on the eve of entering religion was afflicted with
severe ear-trouble, with the prospect of meningitis, and such pains as
made it appear impossible that she should ever enter a convent. She
writes: "Thank you for helping me to understand. I now see the full
meaning of suffering and I bless it. I can no longer hear anything with
my left ear. On Monday they are going to operate; the specialist hopes,
but he does not promise, that it will improve matters. Now everything
is simple. Since I formally abandoned myself to the Divine will I seem
to have got rid of all uneasiness. Yes, everything is quite simple now.
Please, Father, pray at Mass that I may receive a full and intense
share of the spirit of sacrifice. With all my soul I want to make
reparation by complete surrender to the will of God, whatever it may
be."

There may often be examples of excess; sometimes virtue put to the test
may fail-----hence
the need for great prudence in spiritual direction and
for judgment in the discernment of spirits;-----but
it cannot be denied
that there are many souls that feel the attraction for the life of
complete sacrifice and reparation, earnest, prudent souls, but souls
that do not hesitate to offer themselves in sacrifice without reserve.

1. On May I, 1928, the Congregation of Rites met
to discuss three
miracles attributed to the intercession of the Ven. Claude de la
Colombiere, and proposed for the Cause of his Beatification. He died in
1632. 2. P. Bainvel: La dévotion au Sacré Cœur, part 3, ch. i, p. 200 (ed.
1911). 3. See Lepin: Idee
de Vietime, pp. 367, 368, 395. 4. See The-lj!al of Reparation, Christ in Our
Brethren, The Folly of the Cross";bythe'same author. Burns Oates &
Washbourne. 5. Pott's disease is a presentation
of extrapulmonary tuberculosis that affects the spine. Precisely it is
called tuberculous spondylitis
and the
original name was formed after Percivall Pott, a London surgeon. It is
most commonly localized in the thoracic portion of the spine.

Common signs and symptoms
are: back pain, fever, anorexia and weight loss.

Paraplegia is a condition which results from injury or trauma to the
spinal cord.-----------The
Web Master